Verbal Abuse

Bob Baker's article on cruelty and emotional abuse made me think about who defines what is abusive. If you ask children from extremely violent homes if they are in emotional pain: A) Some will say yes. B) Some will say no and secretly feel yes. C) Many will honestly say no, believing they do not hurt inside. Group C has disowned their fear and pain. I feel a sadness for Groups A and B, both of whom are conscious of their pain and fear. While I also feel compassion for Group C, which has disowned its pain, I am very fearful and angry with the political consequences this group wreaks.

Riverside King boys' basketball Coach Tim Sweeney Jr., one of the most successful in the Inland Empire, announced in a news release Friday he has been asked to step down by his school administration, and he cited issues involving the booster club as a key reason. Sweeney, the head coach for 14 years, won three Southern Section titles and a state title in 2002. His team won a Southern Section 1A title this last season, and he gave hints of issues at the winning news conference, saying he had been close to resigning.

VERBAL INTERACTION 1: Interviewer: Are there really that many browbeaten wimps out there who feel they need a book titled "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense?" Author: I don't know that I'm willing to go for the term 'wimps,' because for me the term applie s only to males. But, yes ... there are a lot of unhappy people out there, and most of the time their problem turns out to be that they're verbal victims.

What do pediatricians call a coach who screams at his players, blames kids for prompting his outbursts and says his methods are justified because the team wins games? A bully. A more typical picture of a bully is a big kid intimidating a smaller one on a playground. But it's not age that defines a bully; it's power. “Nothing in the definition requires a peer-to-peer relationship, only one individual with perceived power over another,” experts write in an article published Monday in the journal Pediatrics . “The coach-athlete relationship involves an inherent imbalance of power.” Bullying is more than an annoyance.

Texas basketball Coach Tom Penders countered complaints from a few players about his coaching style on Monday while simultaneously defending his character. "I'm not perfect. I have many faults, but I have never abused any player in my 30 years as a head coach," Penders told a news conference in Austin, Texas. Penders said he would let former players, including ones now on his staff, defend his coaching style while he concentrated on defending his character.

A judge Thursday awarded a woman $12,400 in a ruling that for the first time recognized verbal sexual harassment as illegal in the Japanese workplace. "Although the term sexual harassment was not used, the judge recognized that sexual discrimination is illegal," said Ikuko Tsujimoto, lawyer for the plaintiff. The case was widely called the first sexual harassment suit in Japan, a country where women traditionally have remained silent about unwelcome physical actions and verbal abuse from men.

A federal judge has told the Orange County Sheriff's Department to make sure that its deputies refrain from verbal abuse of jail inmates and "maintain their professional demeanor at all times." "The court is fully aware that 'psychological abuse' is not a one-way street and that sheriff's deputies are subjected to verbal abuse that tempts them sorely to respond in kind," U.S. District Judge William P. Gray wrote in a memorandum to the county counsel.

Jim Flood has taken so much verbal abuse from professional tennis players that he has a difficult time keeping track of who said what. That's understandable considering that the Redondo Beach resident has been a tennis umpire and linesman for almost a decade. "It does take a unique individual to be an umpire," he said. "You have to have a degree of patience and self-control. They (players) will try to intimidate you."

Police officials are seeking a court order to quiet striking drywall workers who for more than a week have demonstrated outside a construction site, forcing the deployment of two police squads to keep peace in the small west side neighborhood. Police Chief Joseph T. Molloy said Wednesday that he did not want to deny the workers' right to protest but rather to end what he described as a continuous barrage of insults and taunts hurled at his officers by angry workers.

Accused of verbally abusing her sixth-grade students by calling them names like "loser" and "brat," and using vulgarity in class, a Simi Valley teacher may lose her job because of the alleged misconduct. A three-member panel has just concluded 11 days of hearings about the fate of teacher Vera Mantor, who was placed on paid administrative leave after she was removed from her Madera Elementary School classroom last March.

A simple request: Please stop calling Sarah Palin names. If you find her politics repellant and her intellectual gifts lacking, fine. Just say so. But stop with the verbal abuse and the debased revenge fantasies. Palin has always had a gift for making her critics crazy. But it's been five years since she was sprung from Alaskan obscurity as kind of “Hail Mary pass” for John McCain's faltering presidential dreams. Liberals: She can't hurt you anymore. It's time to get over her. Her career is about self-enrichment now, not politics. She's found a formula for financial success and continuing celebrity.

There is more than just a little bit of Ron Hextall living in the body of Kings goalie Jonathan Quick. That is, the once-hot-tempered goalie Ron Hextall, not the current calm corporate Ron Hextall, the Kings' assistant general manager, destined to run an NHL team someday. Quick waved his stick and verbally went after both referees after the Kings lost, 2-1, in overtime to the Sharks in Game 3 of their Western Conference semifinal series at San Jose on Saturday night. He received a game misconduct for his actions but escaped supplementary discipline from the NHL. The league said Sunday that Quick would not be fined or suspended.

Kurt Busch knew it was coming. Even as he was lashing out at a reporter Saturday night -- a rather mild outburst by his standards -- Busch acknowledged that he was going to get in trouble for his actions. And he did. On Monday, NASCAR suspended Busch until June 13 for verbally abusing reporter Bob Pockrass of SportingNews.com. That means Busch, currently 26th in the Sprint Cup standings, won't be able to participate in this weekend's Cup race at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway.

A lawyer representing a Westlake Village man who was charged Tuesday in the fatal shooting of a Pasadena art college instructor said his client had been traumatized by years of insults targeting his Japanese heritage. "This is a textbook heat-of-passion incident, which a jury would consider" in weighing whether Steven Ronald Honma "is guilty of murder or a lower-level homicide such as a manslaughter," said Dmitry Gorin, whose law firm is representing Honma, 54, who was arrested Sunday in connection with the weekend slaying at a Persian new year's party.

Dear Amy: I have been married for 30 years. I endured put-downs, slurs and nastiness from my husband's parents for the entirety of our marriage -- with no help from my husband. A year ago, my mother-in-law passed away and my father-in-law was placed in the dementia unit of a nursing home. My problem is that I am still furious at how they treated me -- and terribly disappointed that the close relationship I always wanted with them never happened. I tried and tried, but everything about me was dead wrong: my ethnicity, my weight, my education (I have a doctorate, and my husband has a high school diploma, so they called me "Miss Know-It-All")

Internal investigators at the Justice Department found "significant problems" in the way that scores of immigrants were detained after the Sept. 11 attacks, from excessive delays in the release of suspects to "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" by some federal correctional officers.

Before boarding a shuttle van at Los Angeles International Airport, Howard More, who uses a wheelchair, told the driver his Pasadena address. To his astonishment, the van traveled first to Venice. Next, Hollywood. Then Burbank. The trip home took more than two hours. "The driver knew exactly what he was doing in grabbing me, an exhausted, elderly, handicapped man," said More, 79. A review of consumer complaints indicates More's experience is not uncommon.

The psychologists who say that teasing is mostly benign ("Hey, Poo-Poo Head, Let's Be Friends: Childhood Teasing Needn't Be Traumatic," Dec. 6) presumably must believe similarly that rape is often well-intentioned. The "teasing" relationship is very like the sexual one: As long as it's mutually consensual, there's no problem; if one person is doing it to another against that other person's will, it's psychological and emotional rape. Not surprisingly, teasers who say "Lighten up! I was only teasing!"

It's fourth period at Olympic High School in Santa Monica and a group of students is trying to sort out at what point the attentions of a fellow teen turns into abuse. "When someone touches you and you don't want it," says one girl. "But you should know when someone's feeling on you," counters another. "Only a dumb broad stays with someone who's going to hit her," exclaims a third. The two boys in the room, looking as if they'd rather be anywhere else, barely say a word.